Relighting - Scifi Hallway (FFVII Remake Inspired)

Detail Lighting

Comparison with the original

Comparison with the original

I wanted to take a moment to go through my lighting breakdown. The above image is a collection of the most used reference images. My reference boards are usually huge.

After I get my references, I bring them into photoshop and desaturate the image using hue and saturation. By taking the color out this allow me to break down the intensity of the lights, the general contrast, high lights, shadows, and fog.

After that, I remove the desaturated effect and I study the color. I look for any lighting trends, for example the lights about the doors are either a soft yellow or blue light. I added a few more images from my ref board for better exemplify my notes.

After that, I do a reverse grade. I am trying to remove the post processing elements to help better understand what the lighting would look like without a color grade applied. I’m not trying to be a perfectionist here; I’m looking at the bigger picture.

I break these reverse grades down to individual components. The last image was color and this image is contrast. The characters really help here, because I can try to rebalance the photo using their skin color.

Once I make a good amount of progress in lighting. I’ll take a screen shot and bring it into my board. I’m looking for big mistakes and asking myself “does this fit and if not, why?”.

Here’s an example from a very early version. I was double checking the overall contrast and making sure the green was the right color. The scene was giving off the wrong mood. It felt more like a horror game then final fantasy.

In the next version, I changed the orange lights with yellow and brightened up the back wall some more. Better but I felt like the overall lighting was a little too blue.

In the next version I cranked the blue down in the overall lights. This gave good depth but the green now felt too harsh. It was a real tug of war situation with the overall lights being too blue or too green.